special feature
L
Learning your baby has a birth defect is news no family expects to hear. At 19 weeks pregnant during a routine anatomy scan, Maegan Camp and her husband learned their baby’s skull shape was abnormal and were told their unborn child may have spina bifida or another condition. They immediately scheduled an appointment to see a specialist to confirm the diagnosis. “It was the longest week and a half of my life, waiting to see the specialist,” Maegan said. When the specialist confirmed that spina bifida was their unborn baby’s diagnosis, they started to explore their options to give their child the best possible quality of life. “My sister-in-law is a doctor and told us to research fetal surgery as an option, so we started looking into centers that were close to home,” Maegan said.
fetoscopic spina bifida repair during covid-19 pandemic by rosie moore
special editorial submitted by friends steward partner texas children's fetal center 42 connexions
The Camps were thrilled to learn they were candidates for fetal surgery which would repair their unborn son’s neural tube defect while still in-utero and started the process to schedule the procedure. They couldn’t have anticipated what happened next. “COVID-19 started to spread everywhere and a couple of weeks before our window of time when we could have the spina bifida repair surgery, we got a call from the hospital saying our surgery had to be canceled – we were completely devastated,” Maegan said. Fortunately, the hospital connected them with Texas Children’s Fetal Center and the family traveled to Houston for testing. Maegan was able to undergo fetoscopic spina bifida repair three days after they arrived, when she was 25 weeks pregnant. In 2014, surgeons at Texas Children’s Fetal Center® pioneered a minimally-invasive two-port fetoscopic technique to repair spina bifida defects in-utero. The paradigmshifting technique allows surgeons to access the fetal spine in a minimally-invasive way to repair neural tube defects. This world-first fetoscopic approach involves placing two very small ports (4 mm) into the uterus to allow the use of a fetoscope and tiny surgical
